Conservatism's Third and Final Battle

About the Author

I have been lecturing professionally for almost 40
years now, and some years ago achieved my ambition to have lectured
in all 50 states of the Union. The last two states to be popped
into my creel were Alaska and Wyoming, and I will confess that the
fee I was charging in those days had to be pared a bit as an extra
inducement to the sponsors. But at last the University of Alaska in
Fairbanks and the University of Wyoming in Laramie came through
with invitations, and I felt rather as if I had finished The New
York Times crossword puzzle. Now, my achievement is threatened
by Puerto Rico's bid for statehood. If it succeeds, I guess I will
somehow have to finagle an invitation to speak for pay in San Juan;
but at my age, and in the absence of any TV engagements to restore
my badly diminished luster, that may be difficult.

But
other gratifications are still available to me. In May 1996, to my
astonishment, a couple of junior history types at my old school,
Princeton University, managed to get a conference on American
conservatism so far along in the planning stage that the
heavyweights in the history department were unable to stop it. The
sponsors then boldly asked me to give the keynote address! As I
remarked at the time, that was rather like a bunch of
paleontologists deciding to hold a conference on dinosaurs, and
then finding a real live velociraptor to give the keynote address.
I have rarely enjoyed anything so much in my life.

But
that was a relatively minor honor, compared with being asked to
give the Russell Kirk Memorial Lecture at The Heritage Foundation.
The Heritage Foundation, as just about everybody realizes by now,
is and has been for years the beating heart of the American
conservative movement. And Russell Kirk, whom I had the privilege
to know for more than three decades, is one of the unquestioned
icons of that movement.

Every account of the conservative movement
must begin with its intellectual origins in two quite
different--and by no means always comfortably compatible--sets of
beliefs: The doctrines of classical liberalism, grounded in the
British Enlightenment's emphasis on political and economic freedom,
and the far older tradition that derives its core principles from
our Judaeo-Christian heritage itself. In the United States, as the
20th century approached its midpoint, both were discouragingly out
of fashion. But classical liberalism never lacked for assertive
spokesmen and passionate defenders, and in the field of economics
the so-called Austrian school of Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich
Hayek maintained a distinction that even its worst critics were
hard put to deny.

It
was traditionalism--"Burkean traditionalism," as it was often
called--that seemed to have no advocates at all. When Kirk
published The Conservative Mind in 1953, his bibliography
was impressively detailed but pathetically short of works published
after 1900. His very chapter headings, as his narrative approached
the 20th century, told the story: "Conservatism Frustrated:
America, 1865-1918," "English Conservatism Adrift: the Twentieth
Century," and so on.

But
Kirk's great book was to change all that, and to change it, what's
more, for all practical purposes single-handedly. This young
professor of history at Michigan State University had studied
deeply and analyzed the world profoundly. He was not unduly
impressed with the Enlightenment. His mind reached back behind it,
deep into the Christian centuries that had constructed and defined
the Western world. It was there that he found the principles he
would proclaim, and by which he meant to live. As the first "canon
of conservative thought" he posited the proposition that a "divine
intent rules society as well as conscience, forging an eternal
chain of right and duty that links great and obscure, living and
dead. Political problems, at bottom, are religious and moral
problems." It was a rich loam indeed, in which Kirk found the roots
of what he taught the world to call "conservatism."

Without question, we owe a great deal to
Whittaker Chambers, who persuaded his fellow editors at Time
to devote a major portion of an issue of the magazine to this
profoundly important book. But no amount of hyping, even by
Time, could possibly have made The Conservative Mind
the success it became, or to decree the immense effect it was to
have. The Conservative Mind resonated in many thousands of
hearts because it filled a mighty void. To a world fresh from one
immensely bloody war and already gripped in the icy embrace of
another, both fought against despotism that professed to know what
was best for mankind, Kirk offered a faith that was far deeper, and
far truer. He found it, moreover, not in the implications of some
new scientific discovery or some catchy social theory, but in the
long and honorable past of our own civilization.

The
subsequent intellectual history of the conservative movement has
largely been the story of how the two great strands of conservative
thought, classical liberalism and Burkean traditionalism (the "Blue
and White Niles of the conservative movement," as I have sometimes
called them), have come to recognize each other. They have
recognized each other not as adversaries but as complementary
aspects of a single overarching worldview. To borrow a military
metaphor, it has sometimes seemed to me that the conservative
movement's resolute opposition to the advance of world communism
was its response to the great but essentially tactical problem of
our time. Its commitment to political and economic freedom (the
contribution of classical liberalism, as we have seen) was its
profound strategic contribution, the enormously important insight
that human freedom makes possible a level of political and economic
well-being that no dirigiste system can hope to equal. But Kirk's
traditionalism is neither a strategy nor a tactic; it is, in the
fullest sense of the word, a philosophy. As such, it is the bedrock
of American conservatism.

It
is nearly 50 years now since American conservatives, becoming aware
of themselves and each other and drawing on the works of Hayek,
Kirk, and Chambers, launched the great intellectual and ultimately
political enterprise called the conservative movement. Now,
conservatives are in general a rather saturnine bunch. In the
earliest days of the movement, we learned the ashy taste of defeat.
And when, in the fullness of time, victories began to come our
way--at first, just one or two, then ultimately victories beyond
imagination or measure--we morosely refused to admit that anything
had changed very much. Like Evelyn Waugh, we complained that our
political representatives, for all their vaunted success, hadn't
managed to turn the clock back by so much as a single minute. We
pointed out that the national debt was still rising, that the
federal budgets were still expanding, and that taxes overall were
still increasing.

All
of these things are still true, and all are deplorable. But it
takes a very selective analysis of the state of our nation to
conclude that conservatives therefore have little or nothing to
cheer about. Just for one thing, the conservative movement's
steadfast opposition to the advance of world communism culminated
in the near-total collapse of the foe. For another, over the past
quarter-century it has become plain to just about everyone that
economic freedom deserves to rank with political democracy as one
of the fundamental preconditions of human happiness. Socialism, in
all its forms and guises, has joined communism on the ash heap of
history.

In
other words, both conservatism's major tactical initiative and its
central strategic insight have been validated by victories that,
three decades ago, would have been derided as unimaginable. And all
this has happened in our time, right before our eyes, and with our
happy complicity.

So I
don't share the usual conservative appetite for doom and gloom. No
doubt this is in part simply a temperamental idiosyncrasy. The
glass is always both half-full and half-empty. "This is the best of
all possible worlds," chirps the optimist. "Yes," groans the
pessimist, "I'm afraid you're right." But it is a sin against
reality itself, it seems to me, not to admit, and rejoice in the
fact that in its first half-century conservatism has won two of the
three great battles it was founded to wage.

It
is this third battle--Kirk's battle--the philosophical battle
between post-Enlightenment modernity and the Judaeo-Christian
tradition, that is still going on. It is hardly surprising that
this should be what the communist hymn, "The Internationale,"
called la lutte finale--the final conflict--for it involves
mankind's deepest convictions.

The
opening paragraph of the first chapter of Richard Weaver's Ideas
Have Consequences asserts that "Every man participating in a
culture has three levels of conscious reflection: his specific
ideas about things, his general beliefs or convictions, and his
metaphysical dream of the world." It is at this latter level, the
deepest of all, that Kirk summons conservatives to take issue with
modernity.

Modernity's "metaphysical dream of the
world" took shape in the Enlightenment. It was a dream that
henceforth humanity, guided by reason and the scientific method,
would shape the world and human destiny by its own free choice,
without reference to a god. As Nietzsche, in the next century, put
it: "Where is God? We have murdered him, you and I."

The
Enlightenment was, of course, the fount of many developments, for
both better and worse. It was, as we have seen, the source of the
emphasis on the individual, and therefore upon both political and
economic freedom, that have flowered into democracy and free
enterprise. We must recognize that, in declaring man's independence
from God, the Enlightenment became the vector of what Richard Pipes
describes in his history of the Bolshevik Revolution:

Perhaps the most pernicious idea in the
history of thought, that man is merely a material compound, devoid
of either soul or innate ideas, and as such a passive product of an
infinitely malleable social environment.

I am
sure I do not need to trace for you the appalling consequences
spawned by that vicious assumption in the ensuing two centuries.
Hundreds of millions of people have died in an attempt to validate
one or another of its logical implications.

It
was against this hugely popular and immensely powerful
"metaphysical dream of the world" that Kirk defiantly raised the
ancient banner of the Judaeo-Christian tradition, the essentially
religious dream of the world that had been dominant in the
centuries before the Enlightenment, and that he believed was
infinitely superior to it. Of course, the Judaeo-Christian
tradition had retained many supporters in the two centuries after
the Enlightenment. But it is not, I think, too much to say that, by
the middle of the 20th century, it had almost totally lost its grip
on elite intellectual opinion in the Western world. With the
publication in 1933 of the Humanist Manifesto, signed by
John Dewey and other prominent philosophers and described by the
Encyclopedia Britannica as a "profession of anthropological
atheism based on the theory of evolution," the leading Western
thinkers cut their remaining ties to the pre-Enlightenment
Christian centuries. They nailed to their mast the banner of what
became known as "secular humanism." Twenty years had to pass before
Kirk published The Conservative Mind, and the philosophical
quarrel was opened.

Perhaps the most important reinforcement
Kirk's position has since received occurred in 1978, when Alexander
Solzhenitsyn addressed the commencement audience at Harvard
University. His personal history and his intellectual force
conduced to give his remarks special significance, but it was their
unexpected content that made them resonate with such extraordinary
power.

Not
surprisingly, the speech marked the point at which Solzhenitsyn
fell from grace with the established elites of Western
civilization. He began to assume the lineaments in which he has
subsequently been portrayed: As a cranky old man, a prophet
perhaps, but woefully out of step with the march of contemporary
events. The transformation, of course, was inevitable. For, in his
speech, Solzhenitsyn did a quite extraordinary thing: He rejected
secular humanism bag and baggage, and called openly for the
reintegration of the Judaeo-Christian tradition into the ongoing
culture of the West. In doing so, I believe, he laid down much of
the intellectual agenda of the 21st century.

Solzhenitsyn said,

The
mistake must be at the root, at the very basis of human thinking in
the past centuries. I refer to the prevailing Western view of the
world which was first born during the Renaissance and found its
political expression starting in the period of the Enlightenment.
It became the basis for government and social science and could be
defined as rationalistic humanism or humanist autonomy: the
proclaimed and enforced autonomy of man from any higher force above
him.

Solzhenitsyn acknowledged that the Middle
Ages had favored an "intolerable despotic repression of man's
physical nature in favor of the spiritual one." But modern Western
civilization is based on the dangerous trend toward "worshipping
man and his material needs." This trend has now resulted in

total liberation...from the moral heritage
of Christian centuries.... All the glorified technological
achievements of Progress, including the conquest of outer space, do
not redeem the twentieth century's moral poverty. I am referring to
the calamity of a despiritualized and irreligious humanistic
consciousness.

He
concluded by calling crisply for dramatic change:

It
would be retrogression to attach oneself today to the ossified
formulas of the Enlightenment.... We cannot avoid revising the
fundamental definitions of human life and human society. Is it true
that man is above everything? Is there no Higher Spirit above him?
If the world has not come to its end, it has approached a major
turn in history, equal in importance to the turn from the Middle
Ages to the Renaissance. It will exact from us a spiritual upsurge,
we shall have to rise to a new height of vision, to a new level of
life.... No one on earth has any way left but--upward.

It
is amusing to speculate what Harvard must have thought of this
spectacular eruption of anti-secularism at its 1978 commencement;
but I suggest to you that, in the long perspective of intellectual
history, Solzhenitsyn's address may be the most memorable and most
decisive ever given at Harvard. For he was sounding the trumpet for
the opening of the final battle of conservatism: Kirk's battle, the
battle between two diametrically opposed "metaphysical dreams of
the world."

How
is the battle going? I was interested to read somewhere that the
suave and witty Chinese communist leader, Chou En-lai, upon being
asked about 1950 what he thought of the Enlightenment, replied,
"It's too soon to tell." He recognized that, for all the dominance
of secular humanism among intellectuals, the battle was not yet
won. Science, to which humanism looks for the ultimate answers,
enjoyed enormous prestige, but still faced daunting challenges. The
origins of life, and indeed of the universe itself, still eluded
it. The jury, so to speak, was still out.

Certainly, the battle has been both long
and hard. All of us are, inescapably, children of the
Enlightenment. We have been taught from childhood; the knowledge
has seeped into our very bones that the materialist concept of
reality is modernity's working model, and that, in many ways, it
has worked wonderfully well. If religious convictions survive in us
at all, they tend to be pushed into the background and treated as
matters of strictly personal interest, without acknowledged
relevance to society as a whole. And, indeed, for many
people--including many conservatives of a classical liberal
bent--such convictions do not, in fact, survive.

And
yet I believe there are clear signs that the intellectual weather
is changing. In the nearly 50 years since Chou En-lai's cautious
assessment, there have been some highly interesting developments. I
am speaking here of developments in the realm of science itself. In
1933, when the Humanist Manifesto was published, it seemed
inevitable to its authors, and to many others, that the onward
march of science would soon answer the few remaining really
difficult questions about the nature of reality. Anyone who chose
to continue to believe in the existence of a divine Creator would
be free to indulge his fantasy without troubling the rest of the
world about it. In the past half-century, science has probed ever
deeper into the secrets within the atom, and peered ever further
into the vast spaces beyond our galaxy. It has found itself face to
face, not only with ever more difficult questions, but also with
questions that science, by its very nature, will be forever unable
to answer.

The
central such question, of course, involves the origin of the
universe. Just now, the most popular scientific explanation is that
it originated in the so-called Big Bang, in which existence
itself--together with such attributes as time and space--sprang
into being from an infinitely small point and expanded with
unimaginable speed and overwhelming velocity into the
three-dimensional congeries of galaxies we know today.

Now,
the concept of the Big Bang can (perhaps) explain many things; but
what it cannot do, and what it appears science can never do, is
explain what caused the Bang. We are left, as mankind has been left
since Thomas Aquinas, to posit a First Cause Uncaused, or, in other
words, a Creator.

I
have neither the time nor the necessary knowledge to take you on a
journey along the frontiers of modern science and to point out the
growing number of similar questions to which it appears science not
only does not have--but can never have--the answers. Suffice it to
say that again and again modern science reports encountering
phenomena that seem permanently fated to defy its
understanding.

Some
scientists deny this, of course, but by no means all of them. In
1991, I had the honor of moderating a conference of eminent
scientists at the Claremont Institute on the subject of "The
Permanent Limitations of Science." No view was excluded, and some
of the speakers insisted, in effect, that science had no
limitations. Henry Pierce Stapp, for one, long a senior staff
physicist at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, professed to find a
value system in the implications of Heisenberg's "uncertainty
principle." But I think it is noteworthy that the former director
of the Laboratory, Dr. Edward Teller, made no such sweeping claim
for science. He had been asked, he said,

If
somebody came to you and told you that, on rational grounds (by
which perhaps one means scientific grounds), we can resolve all the
problems that face us humans, what would I think of such a man? I
answered without hesitation: I would call such a person a
monster.

And
the eminent biologist Dr. Leon Kass, a member of the Committee on
Social Thought of the University of Chicago, declared that, for
science,

the
nature and meaning of living beings, and of life altogether, will
forever lie out of reach. Modern biology will never be
able to tell us what life is, what is responsible for it, or what
it is for.... [T]he task of harmonizing competing goods, both for
any individual and especially among individuals who seek them
variously, will always remain the work of a largely autonomous
ethical and political science, helped, where possible, with
insights mysteriously received from sources not under strict human
command. Biology may do some of its finest work when it is brought
to acknowledge and affirm the mysteries of the soul and the
mysterious source of life, truth, and goodness.

I
suggest, therefore, that the really interesting question is what is
going to happen when the fat and happy Enlightenment confidence in
the omniscience of science encounters, as it is shortly bound to
do, this sober realization, on the part of scientists themselves,
that science does not have, and will never have, the answers to the
truly fundamental questions that religion--specifically including
the Judaeo-Christian tradition--purports to answer.

Now,
public opinion polls have clearly established that the American
people are already--or perhaps I should say still--the most
religious-minded of all Western societies. (In this respect, as in
others, most Americans disagree with the intellectual elite.) And
in the past 20 years we have seen a remarkable mobilization of a
segment of religious believers for direct political action. In a
sense, therefore, it can be said that the philosophical battle that
Kirk envisioned and Solzhenitsyn called for is already well and
truly under way at the social and political level, under the rubric
of what is often called the "culture war."

If
what we have seen thus far is the shape the battle is going to
take, we conservatives are going to have to prepare ourselves to
lose many allies who fought at our side in the struggles against
communism and democratic socialism. Many libertarians and some
classical liberals are simply not ready to accept a "metaphysical
dream of the world" that has a central religious component. By the
same token, however, we can expect to gain immense numbers of
recruits in some hitherto almost wholly inaccessible segments of
the population, notably including both blacks and Hispanics. Over
time, I am confident that the conservative movement will win this
final battle too, and that Kirk's vision of an America true to its
Creator will be realized.

But
let me suggest to you that the battle may not take the form I have
described--a knock-down, drag-out free-for-all between the
remaining secular humanists and the regiments of the Religious
Right. We have all witnessed occasions on which an unfashionable
idea, but one with ultimately overwhelming justification, presents
itself at the door of received opinion. At first, and for as long
as possible, it will simply be ignored. Then it will be
misrepresented and ridiculed. Next it will be denounced. And then,
finally, it will (if it must) be accepted, with the dismissive
comment, "We knew that all along."

I
suggest that this may be the final whimper of the intellectual
elite, when the inadequacy of science to answer the ultimate
questions is plain to everyone. It was Pascal who said that
"Reason's last step is the recognition that there are an infinite
number of things which are beyond it."

If
the battle between modernity and the Judaeo-Christian tradition
follows this second scenario, victory for the latter may come
somewhat more quickly and painlessly than one might currently
suppose. There are, I believe, immense moral reserves in the
character of the American people, the heritage of those Christian
centuries, still available to be drawn on in times of crisis. But
it will be necessary for many Americans to put aside one
all-too-convenient crutch, which is the legacy of the 1960s--that
decade in which, two centuries after the Enlightenment and 30 years
after the Humanist Manifesto, the moral bottom temporarily
fell out of American society. I am referring to the current almost
universal unwillingness to be "judgmental."

The
problem, as usual, concerns the definition of the term. Every
Christian knows that he must not judge, lest he be judged; that he
must forgive his neighbors their trespasses against him; that it is
one of the properties of God Himself always to have mercy. We are
acutely aware of our own sins, and feel in no position to cast the
first stone. All this is true, and of the very essence of
Christianity.

But
this personal awareness of sin, and our corresponding reluctance to
condemn others, must not be allowed to elide into the very
different proposition, one that states there is no such thing as an
objective sin, or an objective wrong--or that, if there is, we are
in no position to say so. If a sin or a wrong can never be
identified and defined as such, then we have effectively banished
all moral standards from human acknowledgment and denied them all
human support.

I do
not believe that this is what most Americans intend, or in the long
run will countenance. I believe that this country will, in the
century ahead, acknowledge anew its dependence upon God and His
laws, and reincorporate that recognition into the ongoing cultural
and intellectual tradition of the West.

I do
not want to be understood here as saying more than I have said. The
differences among religions, and among Christian denominations and
liturgies, will remain as vigorous in the 21st century as they have
been in its predecessors. The distinction between the roles of
church and state will remain and perhaps even sharpen, as the
churches awaken to a new realization of their obligations. I do
believe it is possible, and indeed likely, that, by the end of the
21st century, it will be common ground--not only among the vast
majority of mankind but among the intellectual elites--that
realism, at a minimum, requires us to recognize the existence of a
Creator to whom mankind owes obligations that can only be described
as moral.

The
achievement of that realization will constitute the third and final
triumph of the conservative movement as we have known it. Beyond
it, in the centuries that lie ahead, we can hope that humanity will
press on to a deeper and more ecumenical knowledge of its God, and
find in obedience to His will the only freedom worth having.

--William A. Rusher is a Distinguished Fellow at the Claremont
Institute. The publisher of National Review from 1957 to
1988, Rusher was one of the three men who launched the draft of
Barry Goldwater for the 1964 Republican presidential nomination.
His syndicated newspaper column, "The Conservative Advocate,"
appears weekly. Rusher is the author of five books, including
The Making of the New Majority Party and The Rise of the
Right.